Making Fresh Egg Pasta and Sung Choi Bao

Sung Choi Bao is more commonly spelt San Choy Bow is a Chinese dish of mince and vegetables which you serve and eat wrapped in lettuce leaf cups. I hadn't planned on making this today but had some beef mince that needed cooking, some left over water chestnuts, shallots, ginger, garlic, lettuce and Chinese cabbage so this came to mind. This dish is more commonly made with pork mince but was still nice with beef. I based my recipe loosely on Kylie Kwong's but omitted and added some ingredients. The mince and vegetables are flavoured with sherry or shao hsing wine (Chinese Cooking Wine also known as shaoxing, found in Asian Supermarkets), sugar and oyster sauce. A quick, enjoyable, healthy lunch.

How to make fresh egg pasta:

1. The basic rule is 1 egg per 100g of plain flour. Most recipes recommend using 00 flour but I have found regular plain flour works fine. 300g of flour and 3 eggs serves around 4 people. Place the flour in a well shape on bench and add eggs to well.

2. Gradually work the eggs and flour together to form a dough. You can add a little water if it is too dry or a little flour if too moist. Knead the dough for at least 5 minutes and up to 15 minutes. It needs to be really smooth. It helps if you throw the ball of dough at the bench a few times as well. A great thing to make if you need to get a bit of emotion out or just feel like an upper body work out!!

3. Once you have a nice smooth dough form it into a disc shape and flour lightly before wrapping in Gladwrap and refrigerating for 30 minutes. Do not leave it too much longer than this as it tends to be harder to roll out.

4. Remove dough from fridge and break into large orange sized pieces. Roll out or flatten with palm of hand into 1cm thick rectangles. Cover remaining pieces until ready to roll out. You can use a rolling pin to roll into thin sheets but a pasta maker makes it much easier. Lightly flour the machine and the dough as necessary. You need to feed the dough through on the thickest setting twice then fold onto itself, turn 90 degrees and feed through again. Do this several times on the thickest setting and then reduce the setting by one and feed dough through smaller setting twice (no need to fold on itself and turn 90 degrees from this stage). Repeat this process reducing the setting thickness until desired thickness is reached.

5. Cut pasta sheets into desired lengths. About 30cm for spaghetti or fettucine.

6. Feed the pasta sheets through the pasta maker spaghetti attachment or roll sheets and cut using a knife.

7. Place the spaghetti on wire racks covered in baking paper and flour lightly.

8. When you have finished making all the spaghetti allow to dry for about an hour and then flour lightly again and form loose nests which can be stored in an air tight container or zip lock bag in the refrigerator until ready to cook. Fresh pasta does not tend to store well and after a day or two can turn grey in colour. Some people leave out to dry for 24 hours but I personally wouldn't feel comfortable doing this due to the raw eggs. The best idea is to make and cook on the same day.

9. If you haven't had a go at making fresh pasta DO! It is messy and fun and really only takes an hour to do. The kids love helping too.

Fresh pasta cooks in just a couple of minutes and has a much nicer texture and flavour to the dried supermarket pasta.

I'll be using mine to try Donna Hay's Crispy Pancetta and Chilli Pasta tonight so stay tuned!